Prediction APIs - Automating Data Scientists Tasks

It's time to start automating data science tasks.

Nowadays, most of data scientists spends too much time choosing best set of features, finding the right algorithm and tuning parameters.

Imagine if data scientists had one tool or one service that could find out best set of features and the best algorithm using optimal parameters.

We are already seen some companies claiming these capabilities, they called it as: prediction API.  Some examples are:

• Google Prediction API
• Emerald Logic
• KXEN (now SAP Infinite Insight)

Although, I believe that an experienced Data Scientist will always be able to improve the work of any automated tool/process, the prediction API will automate lots of tasks done by Data Scientists, so, what should data scientists do on that time?

• focus on preparing the data (collecting/enriching/cleaning it/wrangling it)
• focus on feature engineering, translating business understating in features and integrating them in your dataset (in my point of view, that's the most important task)
• focus on studying the core concepts, intuitions and possibilities of machine learning, and some key examples.

Checkout these articles:
http://gigaom.com/2014/05/07/the-goal-of-data-scientists-is-to-put-themselves-out-of-business/
http://gigaom.com/2014/04/09/this-startup-says-it-can-find-the-algorithm-that-defines-your-data/
http://strata.oreilly.com/2013/08/data-analysis-tools-target-non-experts.html